Crescendo/Decrescendo

A crescendo may be notated either as a
“hairpin” shape or as the word cresc.
or crescendo. The hairpin can
be created with either of two Finale tools, depending on your purpose.
If your goal is to create a graphic crescendo marking, you can do so quickly
and easily with the Crescendo Tool (on the Smart Shapes palette). A Smart
Shape crescendo has three special advantages: first, it expands and contracts
automatically to fit the layout of music it affects; second, it automatically
breaks into two segments if it straddles a system line break. Lastly,
Finale’s Human Playback automatically interprets hairpins. See Human Playback for details. You
can also deactivate Human Playback and assign playback using the TGTools
Smart Playback plug-in. See Smart
Playback.

If you want to affect the playback only,
and you don’t need the marking in the score, you can create a smooth,
effective volume increase using the MIDI Tool. (Of course, you could also
combine the above techniques to create a graphic and playback crescendo.)

You can also create a graphic crescendo
that plays back (or the word cresc.
that also affects playback), using the Expression Tool. An expression
crescendo, for example, is the only one that can appear in more than one
staff at once. See also SmartFind
and Paint dialog box.

In all cases, the process for creating
crescendo or decrescendo markings is nearly identical.